The past few days have been deja vu for me as I cover the events surrounding what will eventually be known as the “2016 Winter Flood” when it’s discussed by local residents years from now.

I started with The Vicksburg Post in May 2011 at the peak of the record-setting 2011 spring Mississippi River flood.

Most of my memories from that period include seeing water covering the south runway at Vicksburg Municipal Airport, taking a ride over Mississippi 465 in an airboat with two state Wildlife, Fisheries & Parks agents, and writing about the recovery after the flood.

When you work in the news business, covering disasters is part of the territory, and in the more than 40 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve covered my share. I often joke I’ve covered everything but a pandemic, a war, an earthquake and a tsunami.

On the coast, I covered three hurricanes — Georges, Ivan and Katrina — and several tropical storms. I’ve covered my share of tornadoes and woods and grass fires.

I even covered a flood before I came here. That was in Baker, La., a city north of Baton Rouge, in 1981, and while it was calamitous to the residents in that small city of about 15,000 people, it in no way compared with the 2011 flood.

With my wife and daughter still in McComb still packing items so we could complete our move here, I decided one Sunday afternoon to go downtown and check out the area and get a better look at the flooding.

At the time, the downtown area was still full of vacant buildings, but few parking spaces were available. “Rubberneckers” like myself were flocking downtown with their cameras and iPhones busily snapping pictures of the high water. At Catfish Row, several streams of water were squirting through cracks in the timbers closing the South Street gate.

Several days later, a boat trip took me and a photographer over and beside homes marked only by a chimney or vent pipe peeking through the water’s surface, and the water was lapping against the shoulder of U.S. 61 North.

But the flood stories having the biggest effect on me were not the few I wrote while water covered sections of Vicksburg and Warren County, but the ones I wrote after when people were recovering and cleaning up.

I spent a good bit of time in the Kings community and Ford Subdivision, and the sights and smells I experienced as I walked through those areas brought back memories of my experience with Katrina’s storm surge that put more than 4 feet of water in my house. I could understand the plight of the residents I interviewed.

I realize as I report this disaster, I’m supposed to be objective — the detached observer. But with this flood, the memories of Kings and Ford after the 2011 flood mingled with memory of my own experience after Katrina will make it hard.

It’s hard to be detached when you’ve been through the same thing yourself.